Friday, December 7, 2012

Megascifi.com has posted an interview with Robotech novelist James Luceno! Here is an excerpt.

Q: We’ve seen fighter pilots and ground/sea/space troops get killed any number of times in sci-fi TV (albeit seldom with scenes
as moving as Robotech back in the day), but with good guy Captain
Gloval, his actions—although for reasons clearly understood—directlycost
the lives of tens of thousands between at least a couple of occasions
(e.g., the Zentraedi putting his back against the wall, causing him to
decide on executing an untested spacefold which ended up being a tragic
misfold that forced the Macross population to live in constant danger
within the SDF-1; the omnidirectional barrier incident that wiped out
untold thousands on the ground). It had been the first time I’d seen
that in a TV series, animated or otherwise. With these instances, did
that kind of detail in the animated series make it seem you were writing
novels of a saga which acknowledged certain truths about war that many
fictional war stories didn’t?

JIM: This is one of the
things that separates ROBOTECH from the pack: Characters die and
survivors are left to grapple with grief, uncertainty, guilt, regret,
and a slew of other emotions. I think that some of this is more or less
hardwired into the original anime, but Carl and his crew were able to
bring the collateral damage closer to the surface. More of this sort of
thing has been on display since, in Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica, but back in the day ROBOTECH was breaking new ground.